Geoffrey Hughes

Even if all the organizations mentioned above were wiped out, there would still be the problem that their analysis of the regional situation (that Israel is the biggest threat to local security) has become near-hegemonic common sense: only a win if tactics are prized over strategy.

The short-term long-term distinction seems designed to evade the basic problem that Israel was vulnerable in the first place because it was already overstretched in the West Bank babysitting the settlers and left itself wide open. That doesn't just go away even if, say, Hamas implausibly disappears.

What we seem to have here is a primarily subjective understanding of "security" that (at best) works well for those with the luxury of living in the "short term" (like Trump and Netanyahu), but few people have that luxury...

I'm reminded of the Fred Moten line about how settlers build forts on other people's land only to complain about how they're "surrounded"...

A lot of these supposed "wins" look a lot less impressive when you look at a map and see Israel has a shrinking population proposing to occupy more people. Indefinitely. With no political horizon...

Scene from Brass Eye of Chris Morris on left in grey suit reading a list out to a bearded man on right wearing sunglasses, tie and a dark suit (bushes in background).

"You're a promptophile, you're a slop badger, you're a parrot perv, you're a small LLM regarder, you're a bot botherer, you're the Crazy World of Sam Altman, you're a ChatGPT bottler, you're a grok rocketeer..."

"...Yes, well, it's just another form of racism"

I think a lot about how prolonged exposure to a consequence-free environment is so cognitively damaging not least because it destroys your ability to assess risks. Embarrassingly middle class of me, perhaps, but I like to say I come by it honestly.

Another thing I suspect the last few years have left her unprepared for: employees who have zero respect for her and know how to make it hurt. If you see something, say something:

You'd think CBS and its parent company would be more concerned about libel litigation given its uhh... recent history... but instead they seem to be embracing a pattern of behavior that--again--is fine when you run a blog but not so good when you have deep pockets...

She's benefited a lot from the lack of scrutiny that comes from running a lavishly funded glorified blog, but this stuff might hit differently coming from a storied brand like CBS--and all the more if and when the public sours on people with her politics in general...

Never cheered so hard for the Glass Cliff in my entire life.

I remain suspicious that for all the birthday girl treatment she's getting here, she's also been promoted far beyond her level of incompetence and that she's being set up to fail in a pretty spectacular way...

I like to call this the "hard problem" of established liberal democracies: it's not hard to envision a popular political program that could induce a majority to vote for it by improving their economic conditions--but there are so many more well paid jobs in frustrating any attempt to implement it.

A lot of people will say that more a radical politics is unrealistic and utopian--that it pales in comparison to their strategy of expecting powerful people to act against their own self interest--and then fail to even offer a compelling reason why those powerful people would do that...

Not hard to see why: any media funded by dem-aligned donors without extremely stringent editorial controls would eventually begin to question the right of those wealthy donors to hoard our society's resources and exert outsized political power...

Such is the respect for tradition, though, that they still open a bottle of wine afterwards (at 1pm) even though it inevitably sits there, otherwise untouched, like an offering to Elijah...

It's funny having worked for three years in this guy's department because I can definitively say that while some people thought this was what was going on, it certainly wasn't everyone...

This is a decent explanation of why academia—a profession reliant on public speaking—produces lots of people who don’t enjoy public speaking

The “woke right” framing exists to avoid the fact the substantive claims they derided as wokeness have been confirmed by every action conservatives have taken in power.

Fan service, mostly?

"I'm so not mad that I'm talking about you on my album" is basically like the Versailles treaty of comebacks. Nothing left to do after that but walk into the ocean.

Very funny how every time there's an artist that can consistently produce art that really resonates with a broad swath of humanity our society just bombards them with money until they're incapable of relating to other human beings...

The ideal social media is not actually any particular instance, but an up to date contact list. Everything else is details, and every hangout spot will inevitably go rancid.

I think it’s very telling that most of these people have drawn their bigotry line in the sand about AI but have never posted about ICE or Gaza.

Technically the "law enforcement exonerative" tense if we want to be pedantic about it...

📚📚📚 New Book Review 📚📚📚
Hannah Brown reviews // “In the time of Ebola: Youth, family, and emergency in Sierra Leone” // By Jonah Lipton, Cornell University Press, 2024

Find it here in AE 52.4 Early View:
anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

Anthropologist in MOVE bomb bones scandal leaves Penn Museum The associate curator at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, who was publicly accused of mishandling human remains from the infamous MOVE bombing in 1985, has left h...

So true!

Since I see people are engaging with this, it's worth pointing out that an anthropologist USED THE BONES IN AN ONLINE COURSE SHE TAUGHT

The shamelessness here is boundless!

This must really hit if you've had a cognitive brain injury and haven't noticed that harassing the mods until they ban the left has been one of the most successful right-wing media strategies in modern times, producing the kind of information environment where Bari Weiss gets handed CBS news

Protests in Morocco have entered their sixth day after three people were killed near Agadir.
The youth-led movement Gen Z 212 is demanding the government resign, release detained protesters, and invest in healthcare and schools instead of stadiums for upcoming tournaments.

(Linking to the museum's own attempt at self-exoneration because it's so damning even as they're clearly lying through their teeth)